Friday, November 16, 2012

So today, or maybe yesterday, I got a new Twitter follower. So I clicked through, cause maybe I want to follow him back. Turns out he is playing at being poor by living for 90 days on WHO rations or some shit. Because no one can really know the truth about poverty unless is being talked about by an educated white dude who play acts the part of the poor and downtrodden.

FUCK THAT SHIT! You want to know and understand more about poor people. TALK TO AND REALLY LISTEN TO THEM. We get to be the experts on our own fucking lives. You want to know how hard it is for women (cough-Nicholas Kristof-cough) the TALK TO AND REALLY LISTEN TO WOMEN. You want to know what it's like to be a person of color? Then TALK TO AND REALLY LISTEN TO POCs.

We get to be the experts on our own fucking lives. We get to create the narrative of who we are and why we are. Not some well-meaning dude who hasn't checked all of his fucking privilege and who thinks he can understand the grinding, slow- motion horror film that is life in the bottom 20 percent. We are the experts, yet oddly no one ever treats us as such. Instead we are lectured at, imposed upon, stereotyped, and ignored.

If you find yourself feeling sympathetic to an oppressed group, then go educate yourself by reading or seeking out primary sources (since HEY THAT'S A BIG FUCKING DEAL WITH ACADEMIC AND INTELLECTUAL TYPES, UNLESS THE PRIMARY SOURCE IS NOT A WHITE DUDE WITH MONEY).

Fuck me. You know I had this same damn argument around Columbus day. People all over started quoting Bartolome de las Casas, a Spaniard who thought indigenous folks in the New (not really new) World should be treated as people and encouraged the African slave trade in order to give the locals their freedom. Yeah that was mis-fucking-guided. So the dude said some nice shit about Indians. But you know who we should be listening to about the horrors of European colonialism in the Western hemisphere? HOW ABOUT SOME NATIVE AMERICANS WHO ARE STILL FUCKING OPPRESSED. How about Rigoberta Menchu? How about Winona Laduke? Or Sherman Alexie? But no. Instead of quoting actual brown people about the how colonialism, racism, and oppression have fucked them over, we gotta reach into the way back machine and pull out a white, European dude to be the expert.

Wednesday, November 07, 2012

I have been trying to make good stroganoff from cheap cuts of meat since FOREVER. All the recipes I've found either want sirloin or tenderloin or something spendy, or hamburger which is just NOT COOL.

But I want to use good old fashioned chuck roast. The deal with using this instead of spendier meat is that it requires braising to turn it into something edible instead of shoe leather. Braising takes 2 hours, minimum. It's a time investment, but the actual work of cooking it only takes a half hour or so.'

First slice up a bunch of crimini or button mushrooms. I use between half a pound to 3/4 of a pound depending on how bit the meat hunk is. Also slice up a large yellow onion or 2. In a large skillet, melt some butter in with some olive oil. The oil keeps the butter from burning. Throw mushrooms and onions in pan and saute until the onions sweat, about 5 mins. Move mixture to a bowl and set aside.

Take your chuckroast. I got a deal and had a good 3 pound roast. Get a good knife. I use a long, serrated bread knife for this. The teeth go through the meat like, well teeth. Slice the meat in to thin strips. If you can't do thin strips, then do smallerish cubes. Cut off some of the fatty parts, but not all because fat=flavor and because fat helps with the breakdown of the meat fibers that leads to tender meaty awesomeness when braising.

Throw some more oil in the mushroom pan and brown up the meat. Season the meat with salt and pepper while it's browning. You may have to do this in batches. After the meat is browned, grab a glass of red wine and use it to deglaze the pan. The pour the stuff from the pan into a large dutch oven (if you are making a smaller batch of stroganoff, you may be able to keep everything in the frying pan if you have a good lid for it). Throw the meat into the wine. Add beef stock (shout out to better than bullion- heyyyyy!) of about 6 cups for 3 lbs meat. Get out the Worcestershire sauce. Pour it 3 times around the pan. Stir the stuff up and bring it to a boil. The cover and reduce to simmer. Ignore it for an hour.

At the one hour mark, put the mushrooms and onions back in the pot. Make a cornstarch slurry (a table spoon or 2 of cornstarch mixed into cold water) and throw that in the pot too. Ignore it for another hour. Have a whiskey coke. Watch an episode of Firefly.

Check the liquid level. If it is too soupy you can either try more cornstarch or cook with the lid off for awhile. If it looks to low add a little stock or water. Before you add the sour cream in it should look a bit like watery stew.

Make the noodles. Generously salt the noodle water. Cook a package (or 2 if you just made enough stroganoff to feed an army) according to the instructions. While the noodles are cooking, add sour cream to the meat. Use a large container of sour cream if you just cooked a whole cow, or just glop spoonfuls in and stir if you made less. When sauce is coffee with 2 creams-colored, you've got it right.

Serve over noodles. Enjoy the oohs and ahhhs of people stuffing it in their faces.

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

I'd imagine that the handful of readers I still have are totes familiar with the myths (lies) those on the right spin. We all know that when they are disdaining Welfare, they are talking about single, black mothers even though most people on Welfare are white women. We know that when they say voting fraud they mean "how many legit voters can I disenfranchise" since voting fraud is not a thing that actually happens unless Rethuglicans are doing it. We know their racist dog whistles and call them out on it.But it ain't just the right dog whistling. OH NO. Dems have their own shitty lies they tell about the people who don't vote for them. There's a reason why the Rethuglikan sneers about elitism stick, it's because of the snobbery, the disdain, the dripping condescension handed out by Dems in the middle of their "WHY DON'T THEY VOTE THE WAY I TELL THEM TO" tantrums. For example:"Voting against their own self-interest" - this is phrase trotted out by liberals regarding poor, usually rural, whites who vote for the other legacy party. But here's the thing. No one votes against their own self-interest. Poor whites who vote for Republicans do it for god and racism. They see, accurately, that the Dems don't really have anything to offer them. The Dems aren't bringing back middle class jobs, making college affordable for their kids, etc. etc. But what the Dems are (ostensibly, in the most shallow ways) about are anti-racism, which removes the one privilege poor whites have, and anti-fundy bible thumping with the sex ed and "gays are people too" and the "wanton sluts should get birth control". Racism gives them a real benefit and religion gives them the same kind of empowered feeling that liberals get from reading the NY Times and bitching about flyover states.There's another shitty layer of shitty to the 7 layer dip of awful that is "voting against their own self-interest" . We know that the Rethuglikans are the party of freedom from control over your own life unless your rich, white, straight and male. The Dems like to frame themselves as the alternative to that. "Oh we will let the ladies have control over their own naughty bits as long as it doesn't cost up anything". They aren't. See Welfare Reform, the virtuous foodies who think every family can eat nothing but organic fruit and veg on a food stamp budget, and that phrase "voting against their own self-interest".Now see, I believe that short of bad cases of mental illness, people are rational creatures who act in their own self-interest. It's like Elizabeth Bennet says to Lady Catherine, a rich old shit monster who is trying to meddle and browbeat Elizabeth "I am only resolved to act in a manner which will constitute my own happiness without
reference to you or to any person so wholly unconnected with me." I trust people to understand their own lives better than I, an outsider, could. As long as what you're doing doesn't hurt someone else, I don't give a fuck. You shouldn't either. It ain't about you. But that fucking "voting against their own self-interest" bullshit is just a way of saying "You there, poor and stupid person, let me choose who will govern you, for you are surely to ignorant to be allowed to choose for your self". Of course this isn't the only liberal way of dog whistling "poor and stupid". See also "Low Information Voters". Whenever someone uses this phrase, feel free to kick them in the shins and call them a classist shitmonger. Ok, maybe not with the kicking. I know some of y'all are pacifists. But yeah, CLASSIST SHITMONGER screamed in all caps 2 inches from their face is a good plan. I asked the boyfriend if there was a way to just troll the interwebs and have an audio file of me screaming autoplay every time someone uses that phrase. He told me it would just require some tweaking of the software spambots use to leave comments. "This an excellent blog of the most excellent quality. I am glad to have found such a blog. I have also posted on this same topic. Please click this link to.... CLASSIST SHITMONGER." Should I ever win the lottery, I may pay spambots to do this for me. Now both legacy parties can't understand why the underclass of the other party votes the way they do. Poor blacks and latinos are more religious than poor whites, yet they vote for the separation of church and state party. Poor whites have more in common with poor blacks and latinos than with the rich old dudes who run the Rethuglican party exclusively (and the Democratic party, slightly less exclusively). When really, for the bottom 20 percent, the choice between shit sandwich and shit sandwich with pickle isn't much of a choice. Now what no one is asking (because the right doesn't care if you vote and because the left (ha) can't imagine why anyone wouldn't vote for them) is why do we have 46% of the voting age population that couldn't be assed to cast a vote in 2008? Sure the left will trot out pipe dreams about needing election day to be a national holiday. They will, rightly, accuse the right of illegally purging voters. But that doesn't cover the vast majority of regular folks who really don't see a difference in voting for shit sandwich, shit sandwich with pickle since President Sans Pickle is doing the exact same shit the President Pickle did. Neither party will address that, because it's not in their best interest. A president maybe a president of 100% of the population, but neither Mittens not Obama give a flying fuck about the needs of the disillusioned 46%, Maybe they are all just low information welfare queens who are (not) voting against their own self interest?

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

I'm rewatching the last half season of Breaking Bad. And for those who haven't seen it consider this your spoiler warning.

It's
obviously a perfect metaphor for the amorality of capitalism. It
doesn't matter why you get into business. It can be for the most noble
of reasons, to leave your wife and children with enough when you die,
for example. But in the end you are going to be the guy who chooses
future profits over justice for a dead kid. Profits first. Profits only.
Profits over the wife and kids that you wanted to take care of in the
first place. You could also break it down into World Systems Theory, if
you're a bit of an old school structuralist like I am. But that is bit
too easy, all nuclear families break down that way. It's even there, in
the description. A core surrounded by the less powerful periphery.
Nuclear.

Maybe I am showing my bias, but I
hope it's Skyler who takes Walt out. Hank has the same amount of power
and privilege as Walt. Jesse does too, though the fact that he doesn't
recognize it doesn't make it any less true. But Skyler, she can't even
keep Walt out of her bed. I think that's why she is smoking inside the
house. For now, it's the only thing she can do. Smoke in the house where
your husband, the guy with lung cancer, lives. Yes, I want the
terrified wife to take Walt down. Because for anyone else to do it, it's
just a change in management. Just a name change. To break the
structure, the periphery has to take out the core.

Saturday, October 06, 2012

It's a thing I didn't have a phrase for until recently, but something I've experienced since I was a kid.

Decision fatigue it what happens when every single damn choice you make throughout the day has, if not life or death consequences, then rent or food consequences. Eventually your brain just says "fuck you, I'm out." and the smallest, stupidest decisions become paralyzing exercises in stress and futility.

So a few weeks ago I bought a $10 pair of shoes on Ebay. The seller sent the wrong pair and wants me to send them back. She'll even pay for postage. But the tiny decisions needed to facilitate this return have been causing my stomach churning anxiety for the last week. My bus stop is closed for the next 6 months, so to get to the post office do I 1) Kill myself with the long uphill hike to the nearest functioning bus stop or 2) spend another $10 bucks on a cab ride that won't be reimbursed by the seller. Decision 2 Where does the money I have to front for postage before the seller reimburses me come from? Do I borrow it from the Kid, who made a little money working for the boyfriend. No I can't do that. That's gross. 3) Do I even respond to the email(s) from the seller. I feel bad for her. My shoes were supposed to go to someone else. I can't even wear them, they are the wrong size. But everytime another unread email shows up my stomach clenches.

And the thing is, these shoes are not at all important. I don't actually give a fuck. I am freaked out because I am taking home less money than I was a year ago thanks to increased health insurance costs plus the unreimbursed expenses of working from home that I didn't have when I worked in the office. And of course while trying to figure out how to deal with this, I stopped receiving child support. Again. Fucking fuck that fucking fucker. Kid's deadbeat dad is the original shit monster.

So the overwhelming non-decision about what to do about the shoes is just the result of the real freak out. I paid rent yesterday. My paycheck alone wasn't enough to cover the whole amount. So I cleaned out the remaining balance of my savings account. Rent paid, but electric, food, and internet (which I have to pay for because of work) are going to have to wait till the 20th. I have no idea how we are going to get though the next 6 months. I would ask for a raise, but that keeps getting put off because of outside things like the company being sold or the boss being on maternity leave or the client being a big tantrum throwing baby.I'd look for a new job, but my stupid broken body won't be able to make the daily slog up the huge hill to the bus stop to go to a new job. So I am waiting, and trying to figure out how the ever loving fuck we are gonna make it until next Spring, when I can dump my tax return into my savings account (again) and have a little cushion.

And from my neighbors, I hear the same thing. Which food bank is the good food bank and who can drive to get there. Who hasn't paid rent and is waiting for the 3 day notice to be stuck to their door. You all know all this. You've heard it or said it yourselves.

Which is maybe why it is so hard for people to give up legacy politics. It's a relatively easy decision. Elephant or donkey? Shit sandwich, shit sandwich with pickle. A tiny decision, built up to be some grand action of self-determination. I choose who has power over me! And my choice it right and yours is wrong and (fingers in ears) "lallallallallallalllalla I CAN'T HEAR YOU".

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

So the bloggy blog is a little different. Echo, which used to be JS-Kit which used to be Haloscan is going away in a few weeks. I thought of just shutting the whole thing down rather than deal with (AGAIN) changing commenting platforms and importing and blah blah blah.

But even though I can barely be assed to write something once a week, I am not totally ready to give up on Blogger just yet. If Tumblr ever makes it so I can import this whole thing over there- IT'S ON!

Right now I am waiting to see if Discuss imports all the old comments. And if Discus installed comments on Tumblr. If you all haven't visited me over there, where I am ALL the FUCKING TIME, I have now installed comments*. So even if you aren't a hipster with Tumblr full of dubstep remixes (or one of the cool kids like Vest Left, the blogger formerly known as Montag, and BLCKDGRD) you can still comment on my ridiculousness over there. And it's ridiculous. I have an unabashed love for Avengers fan art.

*As I was typing this sentence, old friend o' the blog tested and YES comments work at Tumblr but you can't see the option for the dash. You have to go to the actual page to see them.

Monday, September 10, 2012

So I have this old friend. This awesome old friend. And during the 2008 elections we had some very heated debates. I've mellowed. I am all honey badger about the current election. I can't believe I ever spent so much emotional energy on a party as shit-tay as the Democrats. I am now mostly a nod and change the subject type when it comes to what flavor of shit sandwich people are gonna swallow come November. At least in person. I have a lot of old friends and I don't want to waste any time that could be spent discussing Dr. Who or "How the fuckity fuck does Pandora decide Outkast belongs on my playlist with The Pixies?" rather than discussing shit sandwich vs. shit sandwich with pickle.
But still, the shit sandwich finds it's way into discussions, because it's that time. Not all of these were said by old friend, but he and I are both voting Green. (Lots of paraphrasing. I made fried chicken and drank whiskey. DO YOU KNOW HOW LABOR INTENSIVE FRIED CHICKEN IS?"
"Hey remember when the Dems wanted to repeal the Patriot act?"
"Remember when they cared about habeus corpus?"
"I love the part of the platform that says abortion is between a woman and local control of her uterus, her husband, doctor, clergy".
"It's all about eliminating the middle class. It's a question of if you want lube with it. I vote for Democrats cause I am trying to slow the process"
(me- in response to the above) "I vote 3rd party to speed up people's recognition of how fucked we are".
I love my friends. We don't all agree at the same time on the same things. But Obots they are not.

Friday, August 31, 2012

Courtesy of the ever lovely T.O.E. comes the word dizzling. Apparently it was a misstatement by one of her Frenchie Friends.
So we put out heads together over chat, because dizzling is too perfect of a word to not have a definition. And we decided that there are not enough Lady-Only words for masturbation. But now add one more to the list.
Here's some sentences to try out for yourself.
I needs double A batteries from the store. My rabbit is dead and I
need it for dizzling.
He was way too quick, so I dizzled myself to sleep.
Alright kids, try some yourself. And remember to make dizzle happen (both figuratively and literally.)

Sunday, August 26, 2012

It's that shitty season when people of supposedly democratic leanings get on the "IF YOU DON'T VOTE FOR LESS EVIL YOU CAN'T COMPLAIN ABOUT EVIL" kick, and don't even see the cognitive dissonance in their commandments.

4 years ago I got it from both sides, Democrats who were all "VOTE FOR OBAMA OR WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE! PALIN IS SLUTTY STUPID HEAD! VOTE FOR OBAMA OR ELSE!" And of course there were the PUMAS "VOTE FOR MCCAIN-PALIN! YOU MUST VOTE FOR ANY WOMAN BECAUSE VAGINA!"

Neither party had earned my vote. I voted, instead, for the only candidate that had my own interests at heart. Cynthia McKinney. I don't regret it, not for second.

And now, Obama still hasn't earned my vote. Lilly Ledbetter is not enough to earn my vote. The Insurance lobby give away that is the Affordable (ha) Care Act is CERTAINLY not enough. The fact that Obama grew a set of ovaries regarding "legitimate rape" is not enough from the man who let the abortion conversation get pushed so far to the right that someone fighting for rape and incest exceptions looks positively Rooseveltian in comparison to the shitmonsters on the far right.

Not even the dude and I having the same "if I had a superpower" wish is enough.

I cannot overlook drones. I cannot overlook a president, who in the midst of the biggest financial catastrophe since The Great Depression, can't bring himself to utter the words "poor" or "poverty" in his State of the Union speeches. I can't overlook a president who let the austerity alligators decide the terms of our becoming their dinner.

The Dems haven't regained my trust since the last election. In fact, they've reinforced the knowledge that I do not matter to them. My kid doesn't matter to them. My friends, neighbors and community don't matter to them. Except at election time, and then it's all "OMG IF YOU DON'T VOTE FOR THE PEOPLE WHO JUST IGNORE YOUR EXISTENCE THEN YOU'LL BE RULED BY MEN WHO ACTUALLY HATE YOU!!!!!!!!!!!"

Maybe that's true. I can live with it, because I do not vote against my own self-interest. I do not give my stamp of legitimacy to those who don't care if I live or die. Obama hasn't earned my vote. The Democratic party hasn't earned my vote. In other words, they just haven't earned it yet, baby.

Now you might notice something about all those paragraphs above. Not one sentence is a "YOU MUST" sentence. I use my words. I use my "I" statements. Those are my feelings about my little vote. I got a lot of sheepish "I know he's a douche but I think I have to vote for Obama" statements from friends last election. And not one single one of them got a "FUCK YOU! YOU HAVE CAUSED THE DOWNFALL OF SOCIETY WITH YOUR VOTE" from me. Because it's your mother-fucking vote. Vote your interests. Maybe you are ok with Obama. Maybe you are just afeared of a Romney presidency. I don't know why you vote the way you do. I don't care. It's your vote. You do you.

But if you go around telling people that they must "VOTE FOR LESS EVIL BECAUSE IT'S STILL LESS EVIL" I am going to call you a bullying shitmonster to your face. Because you are. You can list in bullet points why you are voting Team Less Evil! But you don't get to tell someone else what their own best interests are and how they MUST VOTE OR OMFG WE ARE ALL GONNA DIE IN A FIERY REPUBLICAN RAPTURE!!!!!!!

Monday, August 20, 2012

So you all have probably heard about the shitmonster Rethuglican, Sentator Todd Akin, who said that victims of "legitimate rape" don't get pregnant. As if our bodies have a magical defensive mechanism for blocking rapey sperm.

And a lot of the reaction to this ludicrous assault on women has been to treat the man as if he is stupid. Actually that is the first response of left-leaning folks when the right says yet another outlandish thing. Think of how Bush Jr. was talked about.

That's a mistake. Treating the racists, the homophobes, the misogynists, etc. as if they are uniformed rubes. They aren't. What they are is liars. And that is how they should be treated. Stupid can be accidental. Stupid can be fixed with better knowledge. These people, who hate with every fiber of their being aren't stupid. They are lying. They know better, but knowing better doesn't get them what they want. What they want is to remain firmly entrenched at the top of the pyramid.

We need to call them on their bullshit. We need to stop letting them control the debate with these ridiculous claims that have no basis in fact. We need to stop giving them the benefit of the doubt and treating them like the whole difference of opinion is because they lack knowledge. They know the truth. They live in the world, same as we do. But the truth doesn't get them what they want.

So this is the comment I left on Akin's Facebook page:

I can't believe you are
actually as stupid as you pretend to be about biology. No one believes
women have magical anti-pregnancy defenses against rapists. So you must
be liar. A woman-hating, pro-rapist liar.

No more arguing. No more debate. No more letting liars and shitmonsters* control the agenda with their lies. It works with women-hating, pro-rape liars. It works with climate change deniers. It works with "MEN WILL MARRY THEIR DOGS" homophobes. It works with the assholes who try to create Trans* panic by screaming about "OMG WHAT IF A TRANS LADY USES THE WOMEN'S BATHROOM". It works with the douchenoodles who are all "POOR PEOPLE AREN'T REALLY POOR CAUSE THEY HAVE CELL PHONES".

They are liars. Straight up. And they shouldn't be allowed to get away with it for one second longer. They deserve our disdain. They deserve to be called a liar straight to their lying faces. They deserve to be held accountable for the mountains of shit and grief and pain they cause. *FYI shitmonsters is my new favorite insult. Collecting insults has long been on of my favorite pastimes.

Or enough to finish all of the Kid's dental work (one more root canal and crown. 2 wisdom teeth extractions) except for orthodontia for his "vampire tooth" and make a reasonable start on my own dental needs. (I need multiple root canals/crowns, extractions and implants).Plus pay a lingering bill for my IUD (GAH IF ONLY I COULD HAVE WAITED 6 MONTHS I WOULD NOT HAVE THIS BILL).

Or enough to......?

If you put money into the hands of people who are desperate to spend it, you get the economy going. My landlord would benefit. So would Comcast, Tmobile and Seattle City Light. Or the small business that is my dentist would profit. Etc, etc.

But giving debt relief to the banksters only, that tiny one percent of one percent, will never work as an anti-depressant. They simply don't have the purchasing power (or purchasing need) of the hundreds of millions of us who don't belong at the top of the pyramid.

Thursday, August 02, 2012

This post is probably not going to reflect well on me. But fuck it. We all gotta admit that we're all a little (lot) racist sometimes.

So there is this family that lives in my building. Young (early 20's ish) couple and the lady-half of the couple's dad or grandfather. (He's old enough to be my dad, she's maybe 5 years older than the kid). They are Asian, and from my limited knowledge I guessed they were Korean. I think it's cause they are all super tall and for some reason all the Korean people I have met have been super tall. Grandpa paces around the courtyard everynight having deep discussions on his cell phone in a language that isn't English. It didn't sound like it was Korean (or Mandarin or Cantonese or Japanese) either. It sounded kinda like Russian, from the snippets I caught. I've been trying to figure what the hell language it is for over a year.

Now it is certainly not impossible for a person of Asian ancestry to speak Russian. Russians be conquering just like lots of other countries and they are sharing the same continent, after all. But it just sounded kinda Russian.

Tonight, Dude and Lady were standing outside the back gate that I have to walk through to sacrifice my lungs to the nicotine beast for the sake of humanity. (Seriously, I smoke to save your life, and yours and yours and yours, from the ravaging nico-beast). I finally caught enough of a conversation to know definitively what language they are speaking. Portuguese. Brazilian Portuguese, I think. Same unfamiliar vowels as Russian but will all the fun that is a Romance language.

I have lived here for over a year. The fucked up thing that categorizing people by race first means that my tiny brain could not conceive of Asian people speaking, as their native language, something that was from the Americas and wasn't English. Even though there is a HUGE population of Asian people in the Americas. Even though Peru had a Japanese-Peruvian president. Even though (until Friday) I worked just a block away from the International District (aka Chinatown, which is wrong because most of the people in the neighborhood were Japanese or Korean and not Chinese). Racism makes us stupid. It makes us limited in understanding people as they actually are because we are wrapped up in the narrow vision of humanity that racism creates.

Thursday, July 19, 2012

So the little commenting platform that I've used for ages is going away in October. In the mean time, they've stopped all support for it.
Apologies in retrospect and in advance. It's now eating comments. I am not getting notified if someone leaves a comment. It just crapola on toast.
So if you leave a comment and it doesn't show up- it's Echo (unless you're an asshole who's been blocked. And if you are an asshole, you already know you're blocked.) If you leave a comment and I don't respond, it's because Echo didn't tell me and I am way too lazy to check the actual front blog page thingy on the regular.
I don't know if I'll keep bloggering come October. I may just pack up shop and move to Tumblr, since I am reblogging shit over there ALL DAY LONG. There are Tumbrl templates that allow Discus as a commenting platform. But that's a few months from now.
So there's all that. What's new with y'all? Whatcha doing, reading, watching?

Republicans are
typically cast as the bad guys in this narrative because, well, that’s
how they cast themselves. They decided to be the zealots opposed to any
and all forms of REDACTED. In their bizarro world, that made
them the good guys: They were the noble defenders of private property
rights against “big government” encroachment (i.e, the extension of REDACTED). .... Republicans attached a series of amendments
to the bill that rendered it impotent, incapable of forcing the issue
of REDACTED.

And the Democrats let them. Got right on board with it.
Voted it through, and declared the REDACTED a triumph. Because
it was more important for liberals to have an expedient, symbolic
victory than to pass a bill that actually protected REDACTED.

So how have we fared 44 years on from Fair Housing. Non-Whites can now own houses, but are more likely to have been pushed into bad loans even if they had the credit for better ones. Gentrification is pushing poor people further away from jobs and resources and reasonable public transit. Detroit happened. And Seattle manages to have one of the most racially diverse neighborhoods in the country, but since they're building light rail down there, the rents are pricing out the working class people who live there.

Also it's telling that I used the phrase "down there". In Seattle, north of downtown is pretty pasty. South of downtown is pretty tan. Defacto segregation, but it's cool cause it's more about income disparity than race (as if the two aren't related).

In 40 years, what is healthcare going to look like? Will we be taking on intergenerational loans to cover our government mandated premiums order to get paid to private insurance companies?

Thursday, July 12, 2012

I'm sure y'all have heard the internet brouhaha about douchebag Tosh and his army of rape apologists getting their cranky on because people have (rightly) called them out on their shit.

And a ton has been written about how to tell a rape joke that is actually funny (prolly NSFW link unless you have headphones) instead of gross and played out and gross. And BORING. Seriously, like in the course of a few thousand years of misogyny do you really think there is some new, fresh take on "and then she didn't want to have sex with me so I raped her" jokes.

And pleas have been made to think of the huge numbers of victims out there that are gonna get smacked in the face with horror just so you can have a laugh. "Get over it, it's just a joke ladies, hahahhahhaa." If these shitfaces had an ounce of human compassion we wouldn't have to explain why that shit is damaging and hurtful.

These are solid points. Yay for other people making them. But none of that is gonna get the apologists to change their minds and suddenly give us hope for humanity. I mean, come on. These are apologists for rapists.

And it all reminds me of the douchecanoes who like to wear Confederate flag t-shirts because "It's part of my heritage" and by heritage they mean they wish they owned a big old plantation where they could beat the hell out of black folks just like Great Grandaddy did. They are racists, of that there is no doubt. And they are upset that they are getting called out for being racists. They are defending slavery and bigotry as a piece of their heritage. They want to be on the LOSING SIDE OF HISTORY and not be given shit for it.

And the "It's just a joke. It's comedy" folks are rape apologists on the LOSING SIDE OF HISTORY. They are defending rapists in the name of humor. And I pretty much assume that any dude who defends rape jokes is just like that guy who defends the wrong flag. He's the guy who wishes he could just rape the bitches whenever he wants, but us humorless feminists keep him from doing just that because of misandry. (Nope, that sentence doesn't make sense. Misogyny, like racism, is ridiculous and doesn't make sense.)

So fuck 'em. We know the flag-wavers are racist. We know the joke-defenders are misogynistic rape apologists. (And as I said on ye old twitter yesterday- it's obvious the douchebags know rape isn't a joke when it's their go to retaliation threat. ) If they want to spend their brainspace trying come up with Every. Single. Damn. Excuse in the motherfucking book to contort the fact that they side with the rapists, then whoopee for them. Exactly zero fucks will be given by me. Because they have chosen the wrong side, I don't have to give them any benefit of the doubt.

When you defend the Confederate flag as a symbol of your heritage, you're defending racism. Full stop.
When you defend rape jokes as edgy, free-speech humor, you're defending rapists. Full stop. It doesn't matter why you're defending it. Unless someone is holding a literal gun to your head forcing you to laugh at old Andrew Dice Clay routines while wrapped in a collectible Southern Cross fleece throw, your reasons don't mean shit.

Make all the excuses that you want. Twist yourself into a pretzel trying to find some once of logic in your reasoning. You've shown me who you are and who you are is a giant fucking LOSER. But don't worry, there are a lot of losers in the world. You won't be lonely, but you'll still be gross. AND BORING. DON'T FORGET HOW FUCKING BORING.

And you've been working how long now? I was pretty sure that it was my killer work ethic, mad organizational skills, smarter than the average cookieness that lead to a rapidly increasing paycheck until I hit 25 and got laid off for the first and only time. I still, 12 years later, haven't recovered from that financially even though I have continued expanding my skill set and responsibility levels since then.

But you are a special snowflake who will beat the odds of everyone around you, I am sure. Just don't look too hard in the mirror or your unshakeable faith that you are where you are because your deserve it more than someone else might crack a little. I mean, of course you went to a private university with tuition that is almost $40k a year all on your own merit. I am sure that poor kids, like say my kid, will have all the same opportunities that you did if they work just as hard. Oh wait, no they won't. My kid will be starting at a community college. He won't be able to do the unpaid internships that you did to bulk up your resume because he will have to work a minimum wage job somewhere to help pay the $3500 a year tuition at the CC plus books and transportation.

Kid also wants to be a writer, btw. My advice is "Get a degree in anything else. Anything that will pay the bills. You've seen how little money writers make. Get a degree in something that will pay the bills and write at night."

Now I am not cruel, Special Little Snowflake. I don't wish bad things on you because you are ridiculously lucky and privileged and sound a wee bit like a Jr. Randian (and 22 is way too old to be a Jr. Randian. Anyone who sounds Randian after the age of 15 is kind of a stupid and immature shithead). I save that kind of hate for the Gwyneth Paltrow's of the world. But let's be realistic. There is a pretty good chance that you are going to fall on your face. Maybe not now. Maybe not at 25( when I did.). But the economy being what it is and employers being what they are (stingy, even the best ones, and more mindful of the bottom line than of Special Snowflakeness) you are probably going to suffer at some point. So I wouldn't go all bellybutton gazing at your "lack of struggle". It will happen. In the mean time, you should meditate on the words hubris, privilege, comeuppance.

Saturday, June 30, 2012

I had forgotten about the hot rock of worry. It's amazing, really, that it had gone away at all. But having enough money to provide the basics of a life is probably the single best form of therapy there is for those of us at the very bottom.
And then last week it was back. BAM! Right in the gut. If I believed in gods, I would say they were laughing at me for writing about how I was lucky. BAM! No luck for you.

The company I work for has been sold. My awesome boss, who is a fierce advocate for those she bosses, is going on maternity leave next week. Most of the company has already been moved to a new office, a very long and multiple busses ride away. There's 4 or 5 of us left in the old office and we don't know what will happen to us. Will we be turned into contractors and loose our benefits? Will we be sent to a new office? Will we just loose our jobs? No one knows. And the person best able to fight for us won't be there because she has, admittedly bigger and more important, things to do.

I priced what getting health insurance from the state's high risk pool would cost me, since I 1) won't be able to afford individual insurance and 2)make too much money either as a contractor or on unemployment to qualify for Medicaid and 3)Have enough pre-existing conditions to sink any health insurance application. It would cost me more that I would get on unemployment. So would Cobra, if I was laid off.
But I am in this horrid hamster wheel of awful- I have to work so I have health insurance so I can work so I have health insurance and on and on and on.

The good new is that if I do lose it all, the drugs I need to function will run me about $150 a month. Getting a new prescription would be very difficult, as my doctor's office requires a large deposit for cash patients. And if (when) my current meds stop working I won't have any real way of fixing that. But I'll be able to eek it out for a very short while. And most of Kid's most pressing dental stuff has been handled. He still needs one more crown and 2 wisdom teeth extracted. But I have already run out of money for those things this year. All his other teeth are cleaned and filled and so on.

What really sucks is having exactly no control over this. Short of updating my resume (done, the night I found out actually) and daily scanning of the Craigslist job section, I have no control in this situation.
But it could be worse. You all, if you've a few bucks to share, should send it to Sasha . I've been close to that desperate a time or two (or 12). I've been lucky to have found some other way to stave off the desperation just one more day, and one more day after that. I am sure the hot rock of fear is in her belly too.

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

So you all heard the the Supreme Court (of Douchebags) upheld the "Papers Please" section of Arizona's anti-brown people law, right?

This and the drug testing of welfare recipients should be a slam dunk "uh uh, no fucking way, turn around and refund the dollars you used to take this to the court to the tax payers because it violates one of the most fundamental tenets of the Constitution" no go. It violates the idea that a person is innocent until proven guilty. But only for some people. My pale faced, blue eyed boy child would never be asked to prove he belongs in this country. Me, my black hair and eyes, olive skin and being just "exotic" looking enough to get asked the shitty "what are you?" question won't be stepping foot in Arizona anytime soon. Also, Kid's dad, an actual drug addict but a white dude, would never have to walk into a welfare office and piss in a cup to feed his kids (that is, if he was concerned at all about feeding his kids. Which 17 years of experience tells me otherwise).

How does it violate that whole innocent until proven guilty thing? It requires people, who the government has no proof other then being poor or brown, to prove they aren't a criminal (this is leaving aside the whole racist idea that a persons mere existence is a crime depending on what side of an arbitrary line they are standing on) instead of making the government prove that a crime has taken place. Guilty until you prove you're not. Until you pee in this cup and it comes back clean, you are a drug user who doesn't deserve the same access to government programs that a middle class home owner taking the mortgage exemption on their taxes does. Guilty until you prove that you're not of not being a "real Amurikan" unlike, say Sheriff Joe "Don't hate me cause I get paid to be a racist by the state" Arpaio who looks like he keeps his skin so milky by wearing what my friend calls the KKK Snuggie (Thanks Anthony!)

While we're on this whole guilty until your not kick, let's not forget to mention New York's stop frisk. It's just for black and brown folks, according to the numbers. It doesn't actually do much of what it's stated purpose is, namely checking for weapons. I think the last number I read on it (and forgive me, I can't remember where I read it) was that it takes some thing like 3000 stop and frisks to produce one weapon and something like 85% of those are non-white people getting touched by the slimy hands of New York's finest. But if you are black or brown, you don't get to say "Fuck you, you ain't got no probable cause. I'm going home" cause you've just given the cops probable cause with the trying to leave schtick.

Now while I'm telling you all this, remember that crime rates have been dropping since the 70s. We have fewer crimes being committed while at the same time our prison rates have ballooned faster than the interest rate on an ARM. If people are committing fewer crimes, where the fuckity fuck is the prison population coming from? Mandatory drug testing? Stop and frisks? Papers Please? These are the newer laws but think about people in some states who get sent to jail for driving without insurance. GA, if I remember correctly, will put out an arrest warrant if they get a letter from your insurance company saying your coverage has been cancelled. You don't get notified of the warrant. Maybe you just switched policies because you like the Geico lizard. Won't know about the warrant until you get pulled over for speeding and WHAMO jail for you.

Innocent until proven guilty is not a reality for large swaths of the people in this country. It's a privilege. If you think otherwise, you probably haven't been stopped for driving while black.

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Kid and I are dramatically better off now than we were a year ago, 2 years ago, 5 years ago. But that doesn't mean we've joined the ranks of the middling middles. This is what the budget of a super thrifty, lucky small family looks like.

My largest monthly expense is rent. I live in what would be called a rent stabilized building, so I actually pay about what is calculated in that chart for a 2 bedroom apartment. I've been doing some searching for a friend who is looking for a place and I am seeing rents nearly double what I pay for a 2 bedroom. Rooms in shared housing go for what I pay in rent. The trade off is that we have tiny tiny bedrooms and my laundry gets swiped out of the laundry room pretty frequently. I pay about 38% of my income in housing.

The next biggest expense I have is healthcare. I have awesome healthcare. It covers damn near everything. But it ain't cheap. My employer pays the entire premium cost for me (about $1200 per month) but I pay to have the Kid on the plan. ($440 per month). Then there's prescriptions, co-pays, deductibles, co-insurance, etc. All in all I pay about $650 a month, or about 27% of my income.

That's 65% of my total gross income.

The next biggest expense is food. I have a teenage boy. In my best budgeting months, I spend about $500 on groceries. When I am less careful and we eat takeout, I spend more. But we'll pretend I am a perfect human being who never screws up the budget by ordering takeout 3 nights in a row. So let's call food 20% of the budget.

Taxes are another 10%.

Transportation is about 4%. So is my cell phone. Kid's cell phone and home internet are about 3%.

That's 106%.

It is only possible for us to live IF I get child support. That's where the extra 6% plus clothes, entertainment, etc. comes from. And in the months that we don't get child support, the tiny savings account I funded with my tax return gets hit. It's only June and I've already blown through 3/4s of it.

But I'm lucky. I have a full time job with benefits. I live in affordable housing. I have a cheap, short commute on public transportation so I don't need a car. I have a boyfriend who doesn't mind that I pay what I can when we go out (which isn't much. Our last trip to Canada cost me $30) so I am not devoid of joy and fun.

But I'll never be able to retire, or move, or help the Kid pay for college. Or get him the braces he desperately needs, or fix my own teeth.

I live in fear of premium increases, rent increases, cost of food going up, unemployment, loss of health insurance, working until I die at my desk.

If my wages kept up with productivity, I'd be making over 50k. If I got a living wage, I wouldn't have to blow through my savings when child support didn't come. I might even be able to increase my savings account balance. If there was a living wage law and I got paid at the same percentage above minimum wage that I get now, I'd make $52,000 a year. That's retirement/braces/savings account/ college/ etc.

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Not literally. But lemme tell you how motherfucking tired I am of my stupid body. I mean tired y'all. I swear to fucking god I have no desire to have one more conversation with my doctor that starts with "So there's this one weird thing...." Every fucking doctor's appointment, one weird thing. My girly bits are shaped like a nautilus and are trying to kill me through anemia. My nervous system has decided to fuck right the fuck off and BAM!Fibro! and now I can no longer feel the left side of my face. Neat.

It's not a stroke. It's not Bell's Palsy. It doesn't fucking help that if one were to google the myriad of strange symptoms I keep having you end up with the unholy trinity of lupus, fibro, MS. Nope, no help at all.

I most certainly didn't end up at a bar with my girlfriends last week freaked out that this new face problem means that eventually I will be unable to wipe my own ass (THANK YOU MS. J for promising to wipe it for me if it comes to that. I LOVE YOU SO FUCKING HARD YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW).

What I have is trigeminal neuralgia. That's in addition to the fibro bullshit. And the only reason I am not curled on the ground screaming is because 2 of the meds I take for fibro are part of the treatment for what is so nicely called "Suicide Pain", because 90 percent of the fatalities from this affliction are self-induced. Fuck this shit. Fuck it fuck it fuck it fuck it fuck it. I have a migraine in my face that never goes away and am already doing what I am supposed to be doing to treat it. (And of fucking course it may be related to MS, SHUT UP DR. WIKIPEDIA, SHUT UP!).

So I have been extra fucking pleasant today. And yesterday. And I will probably be super fucking pleasant tomorrow. But I HAVE A MIGRAINE IN MY FACE! I DON'T HAVE TO BE PLEASANT. Also I can no longer tell if my coffee is too hot because my face is numb and I keep burning my mouth.

I DEMAND A CYBORG BODY!

This is now officially the Lizzie whines about her health blog. If you were coming here expecting wit, charm, pithy insights, or anything other than the giant whingefest that you have just been subjected to, then boo hoo for you.

Saturday, May 12, 2012

You know that awfulness you feel when you have the flu? The exhaustion. The all over hurtiness. That's what I feel like everyday, even on good days. I know exactly how much time I've spent in the last few years not feeling pain. It was 2 hours I spent in a hot springs pool. Imagine that, counting in minutes or a few scant hours when your body feels almost normal.

I dream of being a head in a jar. Or having a cyborg body.

Fibro is this stupid disease where your brain interprets any work done by your body or pressure put on your body as pain. There are a gazillion theories. It's autoimmune! It's neurological! And you get to play the illness roulette. Is it MS? Is it lupus? Is it some flavor of arthritis? Chronic fatigue? You won't know unless something definitive happens. In the mean time- it's fibro.

A few months ago I was at a party and this woman was telling a story about how her dad is one of those guys who just won't let go of a joke. She illustrated by poking me, repeatedly, in the arm while saying "did you get it". For someone without fibro, this would be annoying. But for me, that stupid round of arm-poking meant 3-4 days of pain. And I knew that's what would happen, but I felt frozen and unable to say "stop" because I didn't want to talk about this stupid disease and explain that her actions were doing me real, actual harm.

Sometimes I wonder if part of the reason for the exhaustion is the amount of self-control I need to go out in the world and not show pain. I make it to the bus stop most nights on willpower alone, ordering my legs to move and grimacing with every step. Then there are the nights that I just can't make the 2 block walk. Those nights are getting more frequent.

Blood pressure cuffs and those stupid rubber tourniquets they use to draw blood make me cry. I wear braces at work so that I can keep typing even when my hands are screaming at me. I have a deep and meaningful relationship with shoe insoles. They are the only thing that makes wearing shoes and walking possible for me. Every single step I take every single day is pain. The insoles cushion the blow a little.

I get tired just taking my bra off, and it's the kind of tired where you don't know if you can make it the 3 steps to the bed. I am pretty sure that someday soon I will be out somewhere and my body will hit the exhaustion/pain wall and I will fall down in the street and not be able to get up.

I take a fist full of pills twice a day. Pills for pain caused by nervous system issues. Muscle relaxers. Pills to combat the horrid insomnia which may or may not cause fibro. Supplements like potassium and vitamin D that are supposed to help. I see an acupuncturist/naturopath once a week. With extremely good health insurance, I still spend several hundred dollars a month out of pocket. And I am in this horrid loop where I have to work so I have healthcare/money to spend on treatments, so that I can make myself functional enough to work. But that's as good as it's ever going to get, functional enough so that I can work and not much else.

Mind the click-bait, btws. It says "Mothers forced to sell their children" though nothing in the article supports that. Mothers in Greece are being forced to put their children into the modern equivalent of orphanages because no jobs, no home, no money.

*It ain't shared anything. They don't share the bounty, they don't share the sacrifice. They made record profits last year. And we get....

If you've been around this here blog for more than a year, then consider this your annual reminder that I HATE MOTHER'S DAY!!!!

If you're new, lemme tell you why.

Mother's day is the day of the year when we get plied with booze, brunch, and presents that scream "my children are assholes* and instead of getting what I need I get bubble bath and an eye mask. DO I LOOK STRESSED? Why the fuckity fuck did you get me the 99cent 'relaxation sounds' cd from the gas station? I don't even own a cd player!!!!!!"

I'd rather skip the day entirely and get, oh I dunno, pay that equals what men (both with kids and without) and women without children make. Or maybe I'd just like to be treated like I am competent at my job as I actually am, instead of being assumed to be shitty because my uterus once grew an alien baby. Or maybe child support that actually covers have the cost of raising a child and is collected in a timely fashion instead of 70 percent of cases having arrears on them. Or maybe affordable daycare, though I am long past the point of needing it, but I am generous and remember how hard it was to pay both rent and daycare. Or maybe enough paid days off per year so that I didn't feel like I was constantly on the verge of burnout/failure.Or maybe affordable college tuition so I know the Kid can get an education. Or maybe an improved job market so I won't have to support him till he's 30. Or maybe a guarantee that the only thing between my ladybits and my doctor is a speculum and not a fucking gaggle of anti-choice, woman-hating fucknuggets. Or maybe universal healthcare plus dental since my healthcare costs for this year alone are close to 25% of my income.

Or maybe what I really want is the lip service about the hard jobs that mothers do cut the fuck out in recognition of the actual jobs mothers do.

Raising a kid to an adult benefits society way more than it benefits me. Yep, I love the Kid more than I love sex and cigarettes and cinnamon whiskey(and fuck me I love all those things hard ) but he's gonna grow up to work and pay taxes and contribute more to society than all the fuzzy Halmark moments could possibly add up to. And that's if he's just your average TAB, white, cis, het male. (Not that kids who are not those things aren't equal contributors. But except for poverty, Kid won the privilege lottery).

So once again, what I really want for Mother's Day is for mothers to be given the tools to do the job we have agreed to take on for society's sake. Society needs kids to grow up and do the work of supporting the generation before and after. So society should make sure that those of us who are mothers now have the tools to support the generation before and after.

Keep the fucking cards and drugstore bath products. (But hand over the booze). I don't give a flying fuck about the platitudes.

*Kid is soooo not an asshole, obvs. He's helpful and grateful and sweet. I don't need him to put on a show one day of the year to make up for being an asshole the rest of the year. Though I did see this thing on the interwebs about how to make a stuffed squirrel from a lonely winter glove. I did request a Kid make me a squirrel. Will it happen? Prolly not. But it was cute. We're spending Mother's Day, or the day before Mother's Day, resuming our picnic tradition. The grown-ups will be smuggling cocktails in water bottles. Tasty foods will be eaten. And apparently this year there will be croquet. We call it Drunknic. And this will be the first year since I went to awful Florida that we've been able to do it. And Kid made cookies.

Sunday, May 06, 2012

So it turns out that a breakfast of muscle relaxers, neurontin, and advil means I actually can do more shit than just lay on the couch in pain. I built a closet organizer and did some massive cleaning. Now I am waiting on the always fashionably late Sylviaaaaa to come over and watch movies. So you all get to hear one of my favorite songs ever. I've been listening to funk all day long and in the bestest of moods.

Friday, May 04, 2012

I like to tell people that when I was about 13 I found a Ramones tape in my driveway and gave up on the crappy tween pop (New Kid's on the Block, Debbie Gibson, you all remember that shit) that had been corroding my brain. And that's true.

But a year or so before I found that tape, I heard the Beastie Boys. Same year I got my first period. I heard other, slightly older kids singing Paul Revere and learned the words long before I ever heard the actual song. Then at my first dance, at a tiny middle school with a 6th grade class of fewer than 50 kids, a class so small that our entire dance could be held in a classroom instead of the gym, I head the actual music of the Beasties blaring out of an old school ghetto blaster. Then, of course, one of the teachers ran over to shut it off because "THAT IS NOT APPROPRIATE!!!"

7 years later, I was in the mosh pit when the Beastie Boys played Lollapaloza while 4 months up the stick with the Kid. Responsible parenting, prolly not. But I was 19 and knocked up and all elbows and mama lion energy. And it was the Beasties. I couldn't not be in the middle of it. Despite being a giant festival show, it remains one of my favorite concert experience. After getting all the standing ovations ever and finally leaving the stage, Billy Corrigan came out and threw an absolute tantrum because "All you fuckers just want the Beastie Boys to come back out again". He was right (and fuck you Smashing Pumpkins!!! I've seen you more times than any other band and I HATE YOU!!!)

And now I am old enough that the idols of my youth are dying not (just) from a hard life of drug use and partying, but from cancer. Fuck mortality. Fuck grey hairs and stiff joints and credit ratings and insurance deductibles.

This is from my favorite Beastie Boys album. I know the fucking music snobs are all "Paul's Boutique 4lyfe!" But whatever, this album has more pop culture references than every Joss Whedon product combined. And the videos are amazing. So kick off your shoes and relax your socks.

Sunday, April 29, 2012

Dear Bitch (or do you prefer "Cunt"?),I am writing with regard to your challenge below about something interesting to say. I am just wondering how such a shallow witch like yourself could ever be receptive to anything truly interesting (in case you're not getting it this is my challenge to you). Also wondering if you're young and dumb or experienced and bitter. The last bitch I confronted came up with the brilliant, "So fucking what?"Don't worry I am not expecting much more from you,Q

This is from a Mr. (I assume mister because let's be honest, this kind of random hate doesn't usually come from ladies) Quimby Smith, or quimbys@hotmail.com

Now after having done this blogging while female shtick for so many fucking years, I have zero patience for anonymous hate mail. I will, from now on, publish the names and email addresses of shitfaces. No getting to hide behind my common decency. You want to be an asshole, you're an asshole whose words are now attached to your (probably made up) name and address.

I am, or was a little surprised to get hater mail. I haven't written anything in months that could be thought of as even mildly controversial. Or even mildly interesting. (Thanks gainful employment!) Why the fuckity fuck now?

And then I remembered, it's election season. And the Obama campaign kicks off in the next week or so. Paid troll harassing the progressive non-believers? Unpaid troll just using election season to spread the misogyny? Does it matter? Nope.

Now I am not even a twee bit religious, but you reap what you sow. And the 2008 Obama campaign reaped a whole lot of lady-hating dudebros. And you know they are all just rabidly waiting to be uleashed.

But if rape threats and stalkers and shitheads didn't make me support Obama in the last election, why on earth would I support him now? Obama is exactly the politician I thought he was in 2008. He's a corporate shill, a warmongering shitface, and a power-hungry asshat of citizen killing proportions. And while I had thought of just sitting this election out because who wants to spend the energy arguing with fanatics that 2 percent less evil is still evil, I think that viscous and stupid shitfaces who email hate will be the thing that brings me back in.

Thursday, April 26, 2012

She's right, btw. We do need to think about debt in a different way. She talks specifically about a debt to nature, but we need to change the way we think about our debt to each other. We owe it to ourselves, our friends and families and children and the children of our friends and families and hell, even people we don't know or care about, to make society better.

I have this memory of spending 4th of July watching fireworks with one of the most painfully beautiful gay boys in history. He grabbed my hand at one point an said "I like to think of it as Happy Inter-Dependence Day!" And since we all know the government has sold out everyone but banksters and fraudsters and kleptocrats, we have to do what we can for each other. People first. You all kept Kid and I from Tent City. I am hoping we can all do the same for Sasha. Every little bit helps.

Saturday, April 21, 2012

Me: (struggling to open a prescription bottle) Why the fuckity fuck do they give people with muscle problems bottles that are impossible to open?
Kid: Because it's child-proofed, duh. And I can open that if you want.
Me: (glowering) You know the ability to open bottles goes away on your 18th birthday, right?
Kid: (does actual face-palm) FACE!!!! PALM!!!! If there was a wall it would be FACE WALL!!!!!
Me: Oh what can I do to make that happen? I wanna see it!!!

And now I am sad because in less than a year I will no longer be able to use and abuse the Inappropriate Conversations With Children tittle.

In not unrelated news, I am officially gimpy enough to qualify for the cheap bus pass. If I drove, this would be the equivalent of getting to park in the handicap spot. I don't know how I feel about that. It's weird. It makes it official and permanent in a way that just having a diagnosis did not. Now as to actually obtaining the bus pass, disabled people actually have to go into the Metro offices downtown to get it. That's just a boatload of gatekeeping shittery right there. Luckily, my work is right around the corner, but it will mean having a very very long day of both work and line standing in the Metro office. If I lived or worked more than a single bus away, trying to get into the damn office might be hard enough to just say fuck it and pay for the full price fare. I keep having that problem with Kid actually. He doesn't have his own bus pass, so he either borrows mine or we have to make sure we have the change/cash for him. Often we don't have any cash because I don't like paying cash machine fees and always forget to get cash back at the store. Kid and I have to go into a different Metro office to get him a youth fare card. He would get the cheaper fare if I did it, but because it is so full of hassle and I have been in mountains of pain since my old meds stopped working, I just pay adult price for him.

Gatekeeping! If you have the time, energy, and ability you can get the benefits. If you don't, fuck you!

Monday, April 09, 2012

It was lost before there was even a name for it. It was lost with the Hyde amendment, that meant poor women on Medicaid had to pay out of pocket for abortion services, unless you live on one of a handful of progressive states that use state money to pay for it.

It was lost everytime another clinic in small town was shut down. It was lost when long waiting periods coupled with long drives meant that poor women with precarious employment had to choose between being fired or having a kid they weren't able to care for.

It was lost when the Family Medical Leave Act made it so that small employers didn't have to provide unpaid the same leave to care for a sick child or parent or to have a baby that large employers do.

It's lost everytime feminism focuses on the glass ceiling with the rising tides lifts all boats theory while ignoring that women are more likely to live in poverty than men.

Feminism is a whole lot about what we do with our own wombs, but it's also about making sure being female doesn't come with a monetary penance. It's about making sure that women don't have to choose between feeding and housing their kids or keeping themselves and their children safe from violent partners.

Monday, April 02, 2012

Went to see the Hunger Games last night. It's more than a week since it was released and we still had to deal with sold-out shows and long-ass lines. But it was good. It's hard to translate a first-person narrative into a movie with no narration, so huge chunks of what Katniss is thinking and large swaths of backstory are missing. And those missing things are generally the details of the socio-economic-politcal issues. But the story is basic enough to still be very strong without it.

That's not what this post is about. The author made choices throughout the book to give voice to the others of society. The poor. The not white. The people with disabilities. They are all represented. What I have found is that people's reaction to what made it into the movie (poverty, race, gender) and what didn't (disability, mental and physical) shows just where their privilege lies or doesn't.

When you are other, when you are someone who rarely gets to see images of yourself reflected in media, you are attuned to look for examples and cling to them like a life raft. If you don't have that particular flavor of oppression, and you aren't making a conscious effort to overcome privileged thinking, then those details are skipped, ignored, tuned out in an effort to make the story conform to the narrative you have for yourself.

This explains all the screaming biggots on Twitter who suddenly didn't have a tear to shed for Rue, a black girl. The movie glosses over the slavery reference regarding Distric 11 and completely eliminates the conversation about how much worse the (mostly Black) workers in 11 are treated for eating food they harvest, versus Katniss being allowed to sneak out of the fence and hunt for her family.

It explains why women and girls, who never bought into the Twilight love triangle dynamic (seriously, the Twilight trailer before the movie got major laughs. I may have said something like "Wrong audience" loudly to the screen) are so into this series. The love triangle isn't something Katniss wants. It's something forced on her. She's a survivor. She doesn't have time or energy to think about romance. And that's obvious from the book, though without her narration it's less obvious in the movie. It's Maslov's pyramid. You can't think mushy thoughts when your belly is empty.

What was left out was the disability narrative. Haymich is a man who drinks to drown out the pain of having survived the games and then watched the Capitol kill off his family whenever he even thought of stepping out of line. If you were to put it in current lingo- he very likely suffers from PTSD. Peeta loses his leg. It's not a terrible cut that magically heals. It's removed. Cut off. He literally comes out of the games having paid with a limb. Neither of these things are in the movie. Haymich cleans up his act quickly when the kids need a real mentor. Peeta gets what amounts to a deep scratch.

But unless you live with a disability, it would be easy to write off these missing plot points as superfluous, or just to hard to fit into a movie that is already very long.

And while the movie does show the poverty of the districts versus the capitol, it missed the story about the class division and colorism within district 12. Peeta, Prim and Katniss' mom are all blue-eyed, blonde-haired, delicate flowers of the merchant class. Katniss, Gale, Haymich and Katniss' dad are the black-haired, olive-skinned members of the mining class.

Now I am interested to see if they include bisexuality and coerced sex in the next movie (spoilers!!!!!!) or if that is another thing that just doesn't make it because of time constraints or a desire for a family friendly rating. I wonder how many people even picked up on that in the book.

Thursday, March 29, 2012

You know what's super fucking funny, I mean nearly made me pee funny? My current Facebook pic is literally me wearing a hoodie holding fat wads of cash, grinning like the Cheshire cat. It's been my profile pic for ages. I must be a drug dealer. When will the Feds by knocking down my door?

That picture, btw, was taken at a friend's birthday dinner after we all kicked in dough to pay the check and cover the birthday girl's portion (Hey Ms. J!!!!)

I think Trayvon was just your average kid, posting funny pictures (hell, as seen above even us boring middle aged moms post funny pictures to Facebook- that's why it exists). But even if Trayvon was some kinda marijuana dealing teen entrepreneur, George Zimmerman could not have known that. All he could know was that a Black kid was walking around his neighborhood and Zimmerman didn't like that.

It's also timely since I got the preliminary statement from the hospital about the cost of my IUD insertion.

Hold your breath kids, it's about to real.

$1950, plus the $30 copay, plus an additional $30 in prescriptions.

Now this is before my insurance pays its chunk, so I will probably end up paying $650. And this was attempt #4, so there are copays and etc from previous attempts.

All this for 5 to 7 years of birth control and (legs crossed for luck!) period control. I can't do the math to figure out what that breaks down to per year, but we'll go with $100. Which is not bad. But it's super fucking pricey up front, that's for damn sure.

Could Google have delivered an IUD straight to my lady bits? Cause if it could, I would have skipped the jaws of life cervix clamp those 4 fucking times I had to deal with it (That last time was, in all fairness, a breeze thanks to super fucking awesome specialist IUD placing doc. Who listened when I said "Freaked out" and used all the lidocaine in the world before doing anything. Plus mega dose of valium.I love you Doctor P. even when the Valium has worn off. I love you!!!!)

This is rambley. What I mean is if reliable birth control were as easy and cheap to come by as searching Google is, we wouldn't be having this stupid fucking debate all over the country about women's right to health care. There would never have been a "Show your boss your whore pills" bill in AZ. The Catholic shitheads Bishops would have to complain to Google instead of Congress because they can't get their own damn parishioners to follow their own damn rules.

We women (and people with unterii) have gone through no understandable amount of pain and sacrifice and hardship to both not be pregnant and to be pregnant. It's work. It's spendy. It's painful. And for fucking once it would be nice if the be-penised half of the population stood up in a full-throated scream and supported us, instead of (best case scenario) using our lady-bits as a political trump card (cough*Obama*cough) or worst as a torture device (cough*every-last-rethuglican-cough).

But fuck it. I'm good till I am 44. I can outlast almost 2 whole new presidential terms. You all can keep playing stupid asshole games, but my uterus ain't your football no more.

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, especially with the murder of Trayvon Martin. Everybody wants justice for his stupid, shitty death and for his grieving family.

But justice is the thing you go after only after someone has caused harm. Never before.

I'd rather have fucking safety, equality, and a society that functions for everyone than after-the-fact justice. I think Trayvon's parents would rather have him alive and happy and unknown than some martyr for Kids and People of Color who are killed by racists.

Justice doesn't actually fix what it broken. It just gives some measure of relief for the ones left behind.

Which leads me to the phrase Social Justice. You know, I don't give a flying fuck if people who are shitty acknowledge racism or sexism or classism or ableism or homophobia or transphobia, etc etc. I don't care what they think or feel. I don't give a flying fuck if they never change their minds about what horrid things they believe. I care that their horrid thoughts and beliefs are allowed to form actions that do others immense harm.

Maybe that's where the failure of social justice is (not complete, little baby steps happen and then bigger steps happen. But so mind numbingly slow that the costs are monumental in terms of lives and burnout). Maybe we have to say fuck the changing of hearts and minds and just start isolating abusive shitheads from the populations they would hurt. Racist cops could no longer be cops. Misogynist politicians could no longer be politicians. Anti-choice doctors could no longer be OBGYNs. And shitty-ass murdering douchenuggets would not get access to a gun.

I don't know. Maybe this shit doesn't translate into the bigger picture. I know that the Trayvon stuff is making my heart break and my stomach turn. I know I am lucky that I will never have to get the kind of phone call Trayvon's mom must have gotten. Kid's white like paper. He could be wearing a hoody and firebombing doctor's offices and he wouldn't raise much of an eyebrow.

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Years old and years blogging, respectively. This here is my birthday blogiversary day.

This year is the first time since I started blogging that I didn't have to curse Georgie W. for starting the Iraq war on my birthday. Instead I get to worry along with all of you that Obama is rattling the sabers for MOAR WAR: Iran Edition. I read rumor a few weeks ago, and granted it was a rumor, that Israel had already knocked out most of Iran's nuclear possibilities. But Israel's not talking cause they want MOAR WAR sponsored by the US and Iran's not talking because they like to swing their dicks and never admit weakness.

Sometimes at ye old blog I feel like I've said the same thing a thousand times over and that nothing ever changes. Except that's not true. When I started this blog I still believed the Democratic party was worth voting for, as they were the only ones to treat us be-uterused as sentient human beings and would never be the party of the have mores and warmongering. I don't believe any of that anymore. Haven't since 2008. Us ladies, despite making up 60% or democratic voters, only matter to the party as political footballs. Suddenly we're only autonomous human beings in an election year.

Fuck that. I am a full-fledged human being every single damn day of every single damn year.

I also started out writing this blog while I still had the tiniest thread of faith in a possible higher power. I don't have that anymore. You would think a loss of faith like that would be a blow to ones optimism. On the contrary, since I gave up trying to figure out how some higher power could possibly be okay with shit heap that this world is, I have more hope. Lives are hard because of some secret master plan. Inequality isn't a test from a higher being. The world sucks the people we let rule us are assholes. That's it. I am much more hopeful knowing that it's possible to change a super fucked up system created by humans that I was thinking that I was some stupid pawn in a celestial chess game.

I know I haven't been the most faithful of blogmistresses. I think I wrote more on my crappy cell phone without internet access or a home than I do having moved up to the top of the bottom 20 percent. It's a time thing. Full time work is full time. They ain't fucking kidding about that. Thankfully, the Kid is learning to cook and is (mostly without nagging, sort of) responsible for the housecleaning. (I'll be damned if any boy of mine grows up not knowing how to make dinner or clean a toilet. NOPE!)

Thanks for sticking with me all these years. You peeps are the awesome sauce on my sundae.

Monday, March 19, 2012

Center= capital (also see district 13)
Periphery = outer districts
Semi-periphery= the close in districts that supply soldiers and tech

And without putting in too many spoilers, I have to say I loved the last book especially for its bold faced critique of imperialist regime change. I know there are others who hated it. But fuck 'em. Collins managed to put some complicated political machinations into a book for teenagers.

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

It only took 4 tries, a surgical dose of valium, more lidocain than all the teeth in all the world need ,vicodin, advil, and one super amazing doctor with her awesome sidekick resident- and I have joined the ranks of the IUDed.

I am achey and crampy and all together too aware of where my internal organs are at the moment.I am also surprised I can type. Gonna go cuddle up with the boyfriend and make gushy eyes at him because he offered to come in and hold my hand. I got a little misty over that.

So not only is Kid older today, but tomorrow is round number 4 of "Let's break the laws of physics using RQ's girl parts". And it's the fucking communist invasion for the 2nd time this month (I knew something was up when the last one was only 5 days long. But hoped that I was just getting a reprieve from the semi-regularly scheduled slaughter. But NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO)

Anyways, since I am now officially a pro at pre IUD prep (and after throwing a screaming fit- will getting a surgical dose of valium) I didn't even ask when the pharmacist handed me a bottle of misoprostol. I got this down. I know what's up. You stick it in your bits the night before and according to legend your cervix magically opens the next day to reveal the lost city of El Dorado!

But that's not what my instructions say. I actually had to go look the word "buccally" up because despite my fairly impressive vocabulary, I had not fucking idea what the hell that was. It turns out that this time I am to stick the pills in my cheeks (face not ass) and wait for them to dissolve. This sounds like some kind of hell. I will be sitting in my office tomorrow, cheeks puffed with gross, gritty drugs, bleeding from my vadge, feeling like a colony of smurfs is waging a spears and mace war in my uterus, counting down the hours till I can sign my damn consent for to have the jaws of life used on my bits, so that I can take the magic pills that will probably knock me the fuck out for the entire ordeal.

(I want a prize for longest run on sentence in a blog post, please).

If 4th time isn't the charm- I am selling my uterus to the highest bidder. It causes me massive issues- but it's super fucking fertile. TAKE IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Kid is seventeen. Holy fucking shit! JesusMaryAndJosephChrist! I don't know how this happened. But I am intensely proud of the person he has become. He is sweet and funny and kind. He's a little bit (a lot) of a hermit. But I think the social stuff is something he will figure out once he's out of the house. I know and love a bunch of late bloomers on the social stuff and they are fine.

This is such a weird time, this beginning of the end of childhood. I am not quite sure what to do with myself. And I have to wait to see what Kid will do before I can plan. I think that is what is weird. Years of being the one in the driver's seat and then WHAMO! and they are driving off on their own. Will Kid stay home for long? Will he want to go to college straight away (he's starting at community college so he can plan as late as he wants) or will he want to work for awhile first. That was one of my favorite people's plan and she's now getting her PhD in math and awesomeness. I don't know. He doesn't know. He has to make the decision for himself and all I can do is give advice. Weird. Sofaking weird.

And weirder still is the fact that I am more, what exactly is the way to describe it. It's like the little fluttery fear and excitement you get standing on a diving board while deciding to jump or not. I am more outwardly that than the Kid is. He's all cool now. He's mastering my raised eyebrow of doom. He would think that I was being silly and ridiculous for being all WOO WOO 17!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Monday, March 05, 2012

Boyfriend and I just got back from a weekend trip to Canadia! Land of hockey and universal healthcare! Here are some things I learned in my 3 days there:

1) I got some serious, hardcore weird looks for ordering a mimosa with brunch in the fancy hotel restaurant. Like I blew the waitress' mind by ordering it.

2) But you can can get booze in coffee shops? (Grower's pear hard cider is the fucking bomb!)

3) For as much as they say it rains in Seattle, British Columbia takes that to a whole new level. I kept joking that we were actually driving on the ocean floor. MY hair was wet for 3 days straight. I didn't dry out until I got back today.

5) Small mountain towns are the same everywhere. Everything closes at 8pm except that one bar where the diehards hang out.

6) I would sell my soul to spend 24 hours a day in a hot spring. I spent some time trying to figure out if a plastic ball, like the kind hamsters roll around in, could be engineered to be full of hot water so that I could just roll around in that all day. The couple of hours we spent soaking may be the longest pain free period I have had in 3 or 4 years.

7) Canadians have succumbed to the under-cooked sausage trend. Seriously people- you need to fucking sear the skin or sausage is just mushy and weird. COOK THAT SHIT!

8) Canadian tv is just as bad as American tv, but instead of channels with people screaming about sports and channels with people screaming about politics, you mostly have channels of people talking about hockey and people talking about politics.

That's all I got, for now. Maybe next time I'll get in a visit to Tim Horton's and try to explain what the fuss is about.

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

if during any of the gasbagging going on as part of the War on Women! why no one has asked if Newt and Calista used birth control when they were fucking behind Newt's wife's back? Or did he just pull out and spooge allover. He seems like the type to make a mess and leave a lady to clean it up.

Or maybe he had a vasectomy? How did that go over when he converted to Catholicism? Would he have to get it reversed because every sperm is sacred?

Has anyone asked Mrs. Frothy Mix if she used birth control with the guy she was living with before Mr. Frothy Mix? You know, that guy who performed abortions for a living? Did she have to convert to Catholicism to become Mrs. Frothy, or was she lapsed? If she was lapsed, why wasn't she excommunicated for fornicating with an evil-doer in the eyes of the church?

And the Romney's- well they've been married for fucking ever. But their last child was born when Mrs. Romney was only 31. Now granted, 5 kids in 11 years is a fuck of a lot of kids in a short time span and I wouldn't want to keep popping 'em out, but last I checked, ladies don't normally stop being fertile at 31. (I'm fucking 36 and it worries the fuck out of me that I might end up preggo even though I haven't missed a single pill in 7 fucking months straight.) So how did Mrs. Romney get blessed with super-fertility for the first 11 years of marriage and then no fertility for the last 30 years? Even menopause only knocks off a decade or 2.

The point to all this speculation about the family planning practices choices of a bunch of slimeballs in tacky blue suits and their other halves is that they are all GIANT FUCKING HYPOCRITES when it comes to dictating what choices the rest of us have available.

And truth is, I don't really give a flying fuck how they prevented pregnancy, or didn't prevent pregnancy, or what their fucking church has to say to them about family planning. But they sure as fuck are invested in getting to browbeat me with some fake book their skyfairy allegedly dictated when it comes to my choice. And if I have to listen to their shitty sermons (and pay out of pocket when it comes to birth control or abortion, even though I have kickass health insurance because their godbag says "ewe lady parts groooody to the max") then their own practices are up for debate. Don't want to admit that you used some kind of birth control, then don't take the ability to use some kind of birth control away from others.

Well not just today. It's a longheld belief of mine, being a structuralist at heart.

Religion and politics are structures we created to corrupt things people are perfectly capable of doing on their own, without hierarchies.

For those of you who are believers- do you really need a man in a glorified bathrobe who stands above you, lecturing at you, to know god? Or does that man, and the man above him, and the man above him, and the funds that must be collected to build the buildings to house the place where the man stands above you and collects money and lectures at you, create a structure that increases the space between you and your deity of choice? Or maybe I've just been soaking in protestant culture all my life and thought Martin Luther was on to something. Maybe I've spent too much time reading about our famous local godbags, the Mars Hill Cult Church, and can't see any benefit from one or a few godly men bullying people because god says he can.

Now politics, we all think we get something out of politics because roads get built or schools get run. That's not politics. That's governance. Politics is taking the power from the people and turning into a game for fun and profit at the expense of the people. That's true, even in a democracy. Politics is the way we choose (or are forced, bludgeoned, tricked, and cajoled into "choosing") who we give power over our lives to. Even democracy, supposedly the most self-regulating of all power structures because us peasants have to option of firing the king(s), eventually breaks down in oligarchy. Like gravity, it is a law. What goes up must come down. What is for the many will be narrowed to the few.

Perhaps Diderot is a bit bloody in his quote (and completely ignores when us lady types will be free) "Man will never be free until the last king is strangled by the entrails of the last priest". After the last week of politicking and religiousizing over women's bodies*, I would toast that dual execution gladly. Let the patriarchy kill itself and it's minions with it.

*FYI- while everyone (with a uterus) was all "Shit look at fucking Virginia and it's rape-o-sound law! Look at all the fucking dudes in tacky blue suits testifying about what god thinks of lady-parts!" Arizona was passing a law that makes it legal for a man or an underage girl's parents to force a pregnant woman to stay pregnant against her will. And if she has an abortion anyways, dude can sue her for damages due to "lost companionship".

On that note, TMI TIME!!!!I had an appointment with the gyno of Valentine's Day (most romantic of all doctor's appointments. I told her that I would have bedazzled the bits or shaved the pubes into a festive shape if I was going to have an exam- but this was just a consult) and I begged, pleaded, damn near cried for her to take out my uterus or sand blast it's baby making properties into non-existence. She wants me to try getting an IUD one more time (round 4- if you're keeping track) and I said I would not do it unless I was given enough drugs to make me damn near unconscious. I had an abortion once where I was given a lovely demerol/valium cocktail and I don't remember a thing. It was, for a surgical procedure, lovely. Gyno (who is supposed to be the best per my regular doc) is consulting with SUPER GYNO! who can bend and twisted uterus to her will. I am doubtful. It's like a bendy straw in there and there is no way to get a straight stick through a u-shaped curve.

Red Queen Says

Modesty is for people with nothing to brag about. You may catch more flies with honey but why the hell do you want to catch flies. Life isn’t fair, so you have to work your ass off to make it fairer. The worst insult is not to be called a ‘bitch” or a “cunt” but to be called a “coward” or “nice”. Fortunately, no one has ever had a reason to call me a coward and we won’t talk about what happened to the only person that ever called me a “nice girl”.

If you have something interesting to say email me:redqueen319 at gmail

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